Text Analysis of the Conflict in Gaza Reveals the Civilian Impact
Background: 10/7/2023 Hamas attacks Israel killing 1,200 people, Israel retaliates.
Problem: Hamas Ministry of Health (MoH) reports casualties, cannot be corroborated.
Claim: “Women & children disproportionately killed” UN-OHCHR
Research Question: To what extent can open-source data be used to identify patterns in the targeting of Palestinian civilians in Gaza?
Data Source: Airwars tracks civilian incidents from conflicts.
Web Scrape: ~ 800 incidents (~9,000 deaths).
Parse JSON: Extract incident characteristics, including geo-coordinates (65% of incidents), & store in SQLite database.
Reverse Geo-coding: Supply incident coordinates to Nominatim API, return site type (school, hospital).
Sentiment Analysis: Derive emotional tone from assessments. DistilRoBERTa-base, classifies text into Ekman’s 6 basic emotions.
Clustering Analysis: Explore geographically civilian casualty patterns.
Cannot discern patterns in the targeting of civilians.